bear - ingn.1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4pl. comprehension of one's position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

24 October 2015

"We really won't have time to miss any school this year," I remember saying at the beginning, "we'll have to make up any time we lose."

Remind me not ever to say something like that again.

+ + +

So, I am in a hotel suite just outside my hometown with my sleeping toddler and my sleeping 94-year-old grandma. I found a place with separate sitting rooms and a pullout sofa, so the baby would not disturb Grandma, and a full-service restaurant, so we could stay here all day.

We are here in this hotel because today Grandma's house is being treated for a massively terrible bedbug infestation. Do you know what a scourge bedbugs are? If you do not, now is the time for you to take a side trip to Google and educate yourself. I have dealt with roaches, and I have dealt with mice, and I have dealt with head lice, and I would take all of them over bedbugs in a hurry (I guess as long as the mouse infestation did not give me hantavirus; one thing that you can say about bedbugs is that they do not carry disease).

My grandma is really a very remarkable lady. She is frail now, but has only really been frail since she was 88 or so; up till then she always seemed the same to me, although maybe my cousins and brother would tell me that my memory is off or that my impressions were poor. She moves around by herself slowly, and you think she is tottering and in danger; but as you watch her, you see that she moves carefully, and pays attention to where she puts her feet. If you walk with her and give her your arm for support, you find (because with your arm out you are thrown a bit off balance) that you are struggling a little to keep up. She keeps track of her medications by lining them up in order on the kitchen windowsill, and every morning and evening after she takes her pills she sits down and enters them by hand in a notebook log, and marks the date. (The log also records COFFEE in its proper place, between the meds that must be taken on an empty stomach and the meds that don't have to be.) She keeps her checkbook register meticulously, paying all her bills and carefully entering them, along with $5 checks to every direct-mail charity who asks her for money and the occasional $11.49 payment to random sweepstakes contests, which my cousin had warned me Grandma thinks she's really going to win (more on that later).

Grandma was widowed 35 years ago; my grandpa, a plumber with his own business, died at 59 when I was five. I barely remember him, but he is legendary, and my impressions from the family stories are of a man who could be loving and exasperating, rough and gentle both. My mother often reminisced that he would shed tears whenever he saw anyone perform anything well or beautifully. There is also a story that he refused to leave a baseball game (or some other sports event?) when my grandmother went into labor, and the baby -- I don't remember which of her three children -- was nearly born on the way to the hospital. I really only remember sitting on his lap, playing with him with a deck of cards marked on the back with the name and address of the plumbing business.

After he died, Grandma became a world traveler. She took at least one trip a year throughout my entire childhood, with the same tour group. She never made it to South America, but she has been everywhere else. Stacks of photo albums prove it. She took my older cousin to the British isles, she took the next cousin to southeast Asia, she took me to the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, all when each of us were fourteen. Her last trip was to London to go Christmas shopping. I don't remember when that was.

+ + +

So, another relative whom I love very much, who values privacy, has been living with Grandma and watching out for her for several years now. This relative has had some health problems of late that got worse and worse over the past few months and maybe 5 weeks ago became uncontrollable and dangerous. The relative was then suddenly hospitalized, although not so suddenly that there wasn't time for the relative to line up half a dozen of the relative's own friends to bring Grandma groceries and check on her every day. (Everybody who meets my grandma adores her. It was not hard to get people to promise to bring her food and fix her thermostat when it went on the fritz.)

One of my cousins who, of the four grandchildren, lives closest (same state, different city), and on whom a lot of the responsibility has fallen because of that proximity, went to visit Grandma at Grandma's house and discovered the bedbug infestation. They had had them before, and it had been treated by Terminix twice, but apparently neither treatment eliminated them completely; and when the population grew a third time, the health problems of my relative had interfered with her ability to act promptly, and so the infestation had grown unchecked for several months.

So my cousin contacted the rest of us, and for a variety of practical reasons, it turned out that Mark and I were the ones best able to respond. We were delayed about three days because of some of Mark's work responsibilities. Then we piled everyone in the hastily-packed car and drove out of town.

+ + +

The bedbugs in Grandma's house being descended from the badasses that had survived two applications of pesticide, my cousins had selected a different kind of treatment. Heaters and fans and blowers are to be brought in to raise the temperature to 140 degrees everywhere in the house.

Mark and I left the kids with his parents and showed up Wednesday morning with the checklist that the new exterminator (not from Terminix) had given us. We needed to remove all loose items from the rooms, take all the clothing (except hanging clothes in closets) away to be dried on high (the kill step) and washed and dried again, disassemble all the beds, empty all the drawers, take everything off the walls, remove all papers and books to be later fumigated before returning to the house), remove all outlet covers and switchplates, unplug everything, and take the wallpaper border off the upper walls.

Since Grandma's house, though tiny, was packed top to bottom with her collections of antique glassware, porcelain plates and figurines, photo albums, and travel souvenirs, this was a formidable task.

It took three days. We fell into the traditional roles that seem to work so well: Mark mostly dealt with the furniture and switchplates and things, and I dealt with the clothes. There wasn't time to sort, really, so I packed all the clothes and towels and bedding in the house into thirty clear kitchen garbage bags, tied them shut and marked each with a knot of orange ribbon, and piled them in the living room. The next day I piled them on the lawn, put them four at a time into clear contractor bags, tied those off, and tossed them in the tarp-lined back of my van. Then I spent six hours at a laundromat with wifi, although there was little waiting time. It takes so long to load that much laundry into machines that by the time the last load was in, the first load was done. I hardly stopped moving for six hours.

One bright and pleasant spot: my best friend from high school stopped by between places she had to be, and kept me company folding clothes with me for an hour.

Those done, I bagged the clothes back up again, this time marked with a knot of green ribbon, and hauled them back to the house, to be stored in the bug-free basement until the treatment ended.

+ + +

Meanwhile Mark busied himself at the house. The second and third day, we brought our 15yo son to help. He moved furniture, scraped wallpaper, fetched and carried. He also spent a fair amount of time with his great-grandma, asking questions about the items he was helping pack into boxes, sorting the old foreign coins. He was delighted to discover a small container full of steel pennies from World War Two; when Grandma offered them, we gave him permission to accept these as a gift in exchange for his work.

Mark told us later, "I can tell that it was a plumber who hung that curio cabinet, with the figurines." It had been attached to the wall bolts with the kind of nut you use to install a toilet. We assumed it had been my grandpa who hung the cabinet, but Grandma told us my uncle -- also a plumber/pipefitter -- had done it.

I do not get back to my hometown very often, mostly on busy holidays. We all spent more time talking with Grandma over those three days than we had in the past several years. As the days wore on, I grew to realize that she really is still on top of everything. Mark had to ask her a lot of questions about various papers he came across, so he could store them retrievably; she carefully explained details about each insurance policy (sometimes misremembering the most up-to-date name of the insurance companies, due to mergers and takeovers across the generations, but remembering accurately the value of each policy and an overview of the coverage details). Occasionally she picked up her checkbook register to confirm dates and amounts. Wanting to know if Grandma would need to be taken to the bank to move money from savings into checking, Mark asked about her accounts, and received more details than he needed about Grandma's system of automatic deposits.

At the end of the third day Grandma and I decamped for the hotel, while Mark stayed to meet the exterminator.

We couldn't settle in until I made Grandma change all her clothes. Nope, I said, you can't change into new pants and then change your shirt. Nope, not even your underthings. Everything off and into the bag to be sealed, and then you can have your new things out of this sealed bag of clean clothes.

"Really?!" She gave me an unmistakeable I'm too old for this look.

"Really."

That done, with minimal help, she combed out her hair, put it back up in a bun, freshened her makeup, got into the bedroom slippers I had bought for her that morning, and picked up the new purse I had bought on the same errand. I gave her my arm and we went down to the hotel restaurant.

I tweeted a picture of smiling grandma to my cousins.

And then a picture of my glass of wine, which all agreed I deserved.

+ + +

Partway through dinner Grandma looked straight at me and said, "Now Erin, I know I'm probably not going to win those sweepstakes. I have enough money, and it's something to do. Same with giving money to my charities. It's only five dollars for each of 'em. I don't have a lot of things to keep me busy anymore, and I like it. So I'm going to keep doing it."

I looked her in the eyes. She meant it.

Well, okay then. She knows what she wants. I'm going to listen a little harder from now on.

24 September 2015

You guys! Believe it or not, this sandwich wrap (in which broccoli slaw figures prominently) was just proclaimed unanimously a hit by three families' worth of homeschooling kids. And also their moms.

I adapted it from the USDA school lunch recipes by taking the 50-serving quantity and, approximately, quartering it. The filling is gluten-free, so have a corn tortilla option for the GF kids.

Our kids, oddly enough, thought it was a little too sweet. It does have a lot of sugar -- but I thought the sweetness was perfect.

Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap (12 generous servings)

Dressing:

1/2 cup mayonnaise

6 Tbsp white vinegar

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 Tbsp poppy seeds

1 Tbsp garlic powder

1 Tbsp chili powder

Salt to taste

Also:

2.5 lb frozen, boneless skinless chicken breasts, cooked and diced

12 oz bagged "broccoli slaw"

6 oz bagged julienned/matchstick carrots

5 oz baby spinach leaves, chopped

20 oz canned crushed pineapple, drained

A mix of burrito-sized and taco-sized tortillas

Combine dressing ingredients with a whisk. In a large bowl, combine broccoli slaw, carrots, spinach, and pineapple. Fold in dressing. Chill.

At mealtime, serve about 2/3 cup of for a burrito-sized wrap, less for smaller taco-sized wraps.

It took me about ten minutes to throw the filling together in the morning before school (with chicken I'd cooked ahead of time). I served these with peas and with string cheese on the side. We all agreed that a bowl of honey roasted peanuts would have been a nice topping for added sweet-and-salty crunch. Some of the kids requested a side of beans to make it more "taco-like."

18 September 2015

A perennial lament about modern education: kids don't write in script or learn cursive anymore. Must be all that texting!

Here's an article from The Atlantic that argues, indeed, new technology had something to do with the decline of cursive -- but it was technology of a couple of generations ago. It's entitled, "How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive:"

The ink used in a fountain pen, the ballpoint’s predecessor, is thinner to facilitate better flow through the nib—but put that thinner ink inside a ballpoint pen, and you’ll end up with a leaky mess. Ink is where László Bíró, working with his chemist brother György, made the crucial changes: They experimented with thicker, quick-drying inks, starting with the ink used in newsprint presses. Eventually, they refined both the ink and the ball-tip design to create a pen that didn’t leak badly. (This was an era in which a pen could be a huge hit because it only leaked ink sometimes.)

...

The ballpoint’s universal success has changed how most people experience ink. Its thicker ink was less likely to leak than that of its predecessors. For most purposes, this was a win—no more ink-stained shirts, no need for those stereotypically geeky pocket protectors. However, thicker ink also changes the physical experience of writing, not necessarily all for the better.

I wouldn’t have noticed the difference if it weren’t for my affection for unusual pens, which brought me to my first good fountain pen....Its thin ink immediately leaves a mark on paper with even the slightest, pressure-free touch to the surface. My writing suddenly grew extra lines, appearing between what used to be separate pen strokes. My hand, trained by the ballpoint, expected that lessening the pressure from the pen was enough to stop writing, but I found I had to lift it clear off the paper entirely. Once I started to adjust to this change, however, it felt like a godsend; a less-firm press on the page also meant less strain on my hand.

My fountain pen is a modern one, and probably not a great representation of the typical pens of the 1940s—but it still has some of the troubles that plagued the fountain pens and quills of old. I have to be careful where I rest my hand on the paper, or risk smudging my last still-wet line into an illegible blur. And since the thin ink flows more quickly, I have to refill the pen frequently. The ballpoint solved these problems, giving writers a long-lasting pen and a smudge-free paper for the low cost of some extra hand pressure.

...[M]y own writing morphed from Palmerian script into mostly print shortly after starting college. Like most gradual changes of habit, I can’t recall exactly why this happened, although I remember the change occurred at a time when I regularly had to copy down reams of notes for mathematics and engineering lectures....[I]f joined handwriting is supposed to be faster, why would I switch away from it at a time when I most needed to write quickly?

I loved this article, not least because it describes a wonderful example of how technology changes daily life right under our noses without our even noticing.

Here, the argument is that the older technology -- low-viscosity ink -- caused our "traditional" script to develop ligatures between letters. It was natural, the kind of thing that happened unless you were being especially careful, and so standard scripts, in which the joins proceeded from letter to letter in a repeated, predictable way, made it so we'd all still be able to tell one letter from another. It was possible to print separate letters that did not have trails of ink joining them, but it took extra care and attention -- and took longer.

Viscous ink of the kind used in ball point pens does not make accidental ligatures, any more than it typically bleeds all over a paper -- yes, we've all known a pen to leak in our bag or pocket from time to time, but I'm willing to chalk that up to a defective pen -- do you notice all the pens that don't leak? This state of affairs would be a miracle in the days of fountain pens only. Since it doesn't make accidental ligatures, standardized ligatures are no longer, technically needed.

(Yes -- an individual, today, still needs to be able to recognize them, because many people choose to write in joined script. But now, it's a choice to write in joined script, whereas in the days of fountain pens, it was a necessity.)

Furthermore, modern pens (because they require at least some pressure to roll the ball and make the ink flow) strain your hand, especially if you're pushing instead of pulling the pen, as lefties do. So -- more ligatures means more ink to force out, and that means more strain.

+ + +

There's a lesson here to learn (ha) about pedagogy, too.

My second-grade classroom had a big poster on the wall showing the proper way to sit while writing and the proper way to hold a pen, the barrel angled far back and cradled by the right hand -- much less upright than I held it. I have a memory, too, of there being a picture showing how left-handers should write, with the pen-hand a mirror image of the normal writers' hand, and paper turned at an odd angle that wasn't even close to the angle I turned it. I still suspect that no actual left-handed writers were consulted in the creation of the latter picture.

I always thought the difference between how I hold a pen and how they told us to in school came from my being left-handed. It never occurred to me it was because schools were still insisting in the 1980s on a grip that was developed to manage the quirks of fountain pens:

Sassoon’s analysis of how we’re taught to hold pens makes a much stronger case for the role of the ballpoint in the decline of cursive. She explains that the type of pen grip taught in contemporary grade school is the same grip that’s been used for generations, long before everyone wrote with ballpoints.

However, writing with ballpoints and other modern pens requires that they be placed at a greater, more upright angle to the paper—a position that’s generally uncomfortable with a traditional pen hold. Even before computer keyboards turned so many people into carpal-tunnel sufferers, the ballpoint pen was already straining hands and wrists.

...I wonder how many other mundane skills, shaped to accommodate outmoded objects, persist beyond their utility.

+ + +

I predict the Atlantic will get a LOT of letters about it, particularly angry handwritten ones.

I have never held a fountain pen -- the experience that gave the author the insight to suggest the real cause of the decline of ligatured handwriting -- but other than that my experience with my own handwriting is similar.

Engineering school forever altered my script. Today it is a mix of block capitals and sometimes-joined lowercase, with the "weird" cursive forms jettisoned in favor of r's that look like r's (and can't, for instance, be mistaken for the Greek letter mu).

Three representative samples of my handwriting. Using a gel rollerball pen, my preferred tool, although I'm also fond of a super-sharp pencil.

Although I taught my kids to read script, I stopped bugging them to write in it when it occurred to me that the point of handwriting is to be legible, rapid, and non-injurious to the hand, in that order. My observation is that flowing script is none of these -- unless you use fountain pens, I guess!

I've moved my homeschool over to teaching Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting, a flexible print that can be joined, not-joined, or sometimes-joined however the student desires.

There's a lot less grumbling about this; it's legible; and we can move on to other things.

+ + +

I don't actually have any vitriol towards cursive, and I'm always charmed to receive a piece of real handwriting that's been written with great care. It is a lovely art form that can bring grace to mundane occasions. And I've experienced many times the fleeting sense of encounter that comes from picking up some scrap of household litter and discovering on it a slip of a loved one's writing. If the loved one has been gone a long time, it is almost as if they live again, for the instant it takes your eye and mine to register it.

What I don't like is the suggestion that lack of cursive is Another Thing Wrong With Kids These Days. It would be like shaking your head that I buy bedding for my family instead of laboriously piecing together fabric scraps from their old clothes, because quilts are pretty.

Anyway, reading this essay is definitely going to help me move forward with a casual approach to handwriting -- without guilt. Legible, rapid, and painless. Those are my criteria. If one of the kids wants to, we can study Palmer script or even calligraphy -- in art class.

17 August 2015

After a few weeks of working on it, I decided that our 19-month-old was toilet-trained enough to be sure we weren't turning back.

So I pulled all his clothes off the changing table shelves in the laundry room, carried them downstairs, and hung them in the first-floor closet.

I asked Mark and my 15-year-old to carry the changing table downstairs to store it in the basement, and when that was done they carried up an old kitchen cabinet and put it in the place of the changing table. It took some cleaning up and a cloth to hide the wood-glue stains on the laminate, but now it's another clothes-folding surface, and a place to stow the trash receptacle and some baskets for sorting outgrown clothes and lone socks.

Today I gathered up all the cloth-diaper covers and put them in a tub and snapped on the lid, and carried it to the basement, where I left it on the changing-table shelf. In another tub, I packed up all the infant cloth diapers, and in yet another, threw some more baby items (bibs, the bag of jumbled pieces of the manual breastpump, receiving blankets). Down they went.

While I was at it, I carried down the infant car seat and stowed it next to the changing table. Then I boxed up some infant clothes in good condition, clothes that had been lying around waiting for me to do something with them.

I hesitated with the box. Take it out to the car, to deliver it to charity? Or set it aside to be stowed in the deep recesses of the attic?

+ + +

It's a matter of probability, I tell myself, not so much a matter of plans.

Very soon I will be forty-one years old. I have three to seven years left, perhaps, in which Mark and I might decide to try for another baby, or in which we might find ourselves surprised by one. I've not had a surprise yet, not in seventeen years of NFP, so I count that probability low; and I don't expect that we will try for another baby, certainly not the way I expected it when we had one, two, three children. I didn't exactly expect it when we had four; I hoped, though.

I'm not sure if I hope or not now. Five is lovely, and my most recent pregnancy was hard.

And we talk about the future differently these days. "Three years from now," we say, "four years from now, perhaps we can do such-and such," and we've mostly stopped adding "if we don't have another baby."

+ + +

"We can get rid of these things," Mark pointed out, "because if it turns out that we need them again, we can afford to buy new ones."

Yes. I've already gotten rid of a number of things. And on the other hand, I saved all the maternity clothes that I really liked, on the grounds that if I needed them again it would be sad not to have the good ones. Those clothes take up just a box or two. And it's really only for a few years. When I'm forty-eight I will have no reason not to toss the sealed box in the car and tote it down to the crisis pregnancy center or the charity thrift store. It's not like I risk keeping it around for the next twenty years because I won't know if I need it or not.

And the same for the changing table, right? And the diaper covers? And the last box of baby clothes? It's just a few more years that they might come in handy. And then I can get rid of them.

+ + +

Probability:

"By age 40, a woman's chance is less than 5% per cycle, so fewer than 5 out of every 100 women are expected to be successful each month. Women do not remain fertile until menopause. The average age for menopause is 51, but most women become unable to have a successful pregnancy sometime in their mid-40s."

It's nothing you would want to count on if you were intent on avoiding pregnancy for some terribly serious reason. And I have plenty of friends who had babies in their early-to-mid-forties.

Still, I also have plenty who didn't.

+ + +

Then there's this: If I lived as long as my own mother lived, I would not see my youngest, now a toddler, finish high school. If I had another baby, and lived as long as my own mother lived, I wouldn't see that new one start high school.

I can't help but be troubled by this one.

+ + +

Packing all the baby stuff up felt awfully final, and not in a good way, even though I'm not actually getting rid of it yet. Somehow I'm reluctant to say, "Probably we won't have another," even if that is, literally, true. Which leaves me reluctant to do the things that one does when probably one (two, really) won't have another, like give away the favorite baby clothes and the good maternity jeans.

I'm not sure whether the reluctance is based on a desire to mother a baby again; or on the very practical consideration that (probably) to do so would never be regretted while to choose not to do so might well be regretted, or being slow to accept this first limitation brought on by age and age alone; or simply the bitterness that always accompanies the closing of a door to the past.

I remember feeling something like this when I was finishing college, getting ready to move on to new things, and some small part of me wanting to stay, knowing to do so wasn't possible.

In other words, I don't know what I'm trying to hold onto here. Is it a gift of life I desire to give? Or is it clinging to a notion of myself as a life-giver?

+ + +

It's a frightening freedom we enjoy. I am healthy, Mark is healthy; we could go for it again, play the fearful and wonderful game. We are completely aware that we could. If we were sure we desired it, or sure we were called to it, we could rise to the challenge.

At the same time, not being called in particular, without a particular desire (only this empty feeling at the boxing up), we are also aware that we can go on as we are, shouldering our bags and hiking off into the sunset with these five.

Love is not a zero-sum game, but energy can be; and I sense a need to direct greater energy to my older children than I have had since the youngest first fluttered to life. My last pregnancy was hard: not dangerous to my life and health, just hard, as pregnancy often is. Mothering this youngest one from babyhood into toddlerhood was beautiful, and I feel at the top of my powers; but all along I felt a pull towards those older children that went unsatisfied, and heard my voice saying "no" what felt like far too much. "No, we can't do that because of the baby." "No, I need you to do this instead because of the baby."

I had to push them all away, just a bit. My arms were full, my energy went to produce milk, the hours of the day slipped by. I'm not saying it was the wrong thing to do; they learned to sweep the floor and cook dinner and clean their rooms, they learned to take the bus. They learned that I wouldn't always be there for them. Which is true. I won't.

But I'm not saying I liked that part of it. And looking at my five beautiful children, one of whom I have to look up to now, I wonder if there really is enough of me to go around. I think there is, barely, now. But I know what it would take to push that over the edge. Not that I'd do a bad job. I would keep it together. I always do.

But I do want my kids to remember a mother who had time for each of them. And -- looking back on the last two years -- I have not.

It was for a good cause. A great cause! The youngest will be there for them far longer than I will. I'm not sorry.

But ... which to choose in the future? Let's just say it is not obvious.

+ + +

"Three years from now," we say. "Four years from now." We think of places we'll go, things to show each other, things to experience with the growing children. We have a vision of a new phase of our lives, the phase with no little children in it, the phase where even our youngest walks on his own two feet.

None of it is a guarantee. None of it is ever a guarantee.

I've never put the changing table away before. I guess that is different. I guess this is the first bifurcation between what might be and what else might be. It feels important.

12 July 2015

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive, I read to Mark while he drives. We pick some nonfiction book that we think will spark an interesting discussion -- usually something we think we'll like, sometimes a work that we'll have more fun attacking and poking holes in. On our recent trip to Ohio, our book for the way down was a 2013 book called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. That was a really thought-provoking one, which emerged with only a few holes in it, and I hope to blog a review pretty soon. On the way back up, we read Laudato Si' from start to finish.

As I read it, I "took notes" by posting little paraphrases on Facebook. I mostly didn't quote, but tried to distill it down to my own takeaways from the document. It wasn't by any means a comprehensive summary.

Mark and I are using the long drive to finally read Laudato Si', the ecological encyclical. Chapter 1 tl;dr: Humans can't just do anything they feel like doing. The consequences hit the poor hardest. There are many possible solutions, but only some respect human beings and put the poor first.

___

Laudato Si' ch2.I tl;dr: So if this encyclical is for everybody, why am I writing about Christian doctrine? 1. Cultural diversity means our thoughts count! 2. Don't you think if I can call on faith to motivate millions of Christians to steward the earth, I should? (not mentioned: because I am the pope and it's totally in my wheelhouse)

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More Laudato Si' ch2 tl;dr: Actually, we *don't* steward the earth just for the benefit and use of all the peoples of the earth and future generations. The earth and its creatures are a good worth stewarding for its own sake as well as humans'. "Till it," AND "keep it."

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LS ch2: Neither absolute property rights, nor renunciation of them. "If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all."

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LS ch3: The bad kind of technocratic paradigm is: all problems worth solving are solved by completely controlling material objects, and by the way, everything is a material object.

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LS ch3: The throwaway culture that wastes resources and pollutes the planet is the exact same throwaway culture that disposes of inconvenient human beings and buys and sells the bodies of the poor.

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LS ch3. Better laws aren't going to save you in a culture immersed in utilitarianism, because the powerful will always see the utility of subverting the law.

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LS ch3. Genetic modification techniques are to be judged case by case, depending on their impact on human relationships, labor, and well being.

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LS ch4. One problem with trying to solve problems via high-level regulations binding equally everywhere is that their inflexibility limits the flourishing of local institutions and cultures. Consumerism also levels differences instead of allowing them to flourish.

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LS ch4. Overcrowded cities might make people live in uprootedness and chaos, but if people weave strong networks of human bonds this can be transformed into belonging and closeness instead.

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LS ch5: proposals. Developing countries get to prioritize development and quality of life; let the rich countries bear the heavier burden of environmental restrictions.

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LS ch5: Somehow, we need both to respect national sovereignty and local conditions, while instituting a real global transnational political structure to make rules about global problems -- with the teeth to enforce them, somehow. Meanwhile, lots can be accomplished by local projects.

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LS ch5: The burden of proof should be on the proposers of a new project, that it will not cause serious irreversible damage to the human ecology of an area -- not on the local inhabitants to show incontrovertible evidence that it will.

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Cell phone coverage prevented me from liveblogging the sixth chapter of Laudato Si' as I read it, which is too bad, because that is where the advice is. Here goes: "Purchasing is always a moral, not simply an economic, act."

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LS ch6, my paraphrase: Environmental education needs to mean drawing out an *ethics* of ecology, instilling not just info, but habits of solidarity, responsibility, and compassion.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. For those who can afford to consume a lot, it is meaningful to instead make small daily acts of conservation (turn down the thermostat, reduce food waste, turn off lights). It's a sort of "little way" of simplicity and self-control wth respect to resources that are not unlimited, and may pay off in ways we can't see immediately.

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LS ch6: "Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little... That simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack."

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LS ch6. One way to restore the right attitude, on several levels, towards resources is the traditional thanksgiving/blessing before and after meals.

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LS ch6, my paraphrase. Encouraging beauty locally, by joining together in groups to preserve a building, a landscape, etc., also is meaningful.

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LS ch6. My paraphrase. To do away with intentional rest is to do away with the most important thing about work: its meaning. In resting we enjoy the fruits of our labor, experience gratitude, and see that it (what we have made) is good.

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LS ch6. Interestingly enough, the encyclical ends with two prayers, one of which is a Christian prayer (i.e., a Trinitarian one) and one of which is suggested for non-Christian believers in God to use, a "prayer for the earth." They are long, so I recommend checking them out yourself.

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Then after I finished paraphrasing, I went back and recorded a few thoughts on the encyclical as a whole, and on our family.

LS thoughts (1): Utilitarianism is the wrong way to calculate which policy and personal decisions to make. You could read the whole encyclical as "the state of the planet is evidence that utilitarianism is wrong."

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LS thoughts (2). If I have a lot of resources, and can spend more of my resources (money, time) to reduce damage or impact, I should. E.g. If it costs me more to repair an item than to buy new, but I can afford it, maybe I pay for the repair instead of discarding the item and buying new.

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LS thoughts (3). We do the traditional blessing before meals, but maybe we ought to incorporate the blessing after meals, like before we excuse the children from the table so we can finish the wine and talk together.

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LS thoughts (4). Private property's purpose is the common good. I think this is a "parable of the talents" situation. You can have stuff to use it, to restore it, to share it, to protect it for later, to turn it into more stuff that can be spread around -- lots of possibilities. But if you can't use that item in some way that furthers the common good, why acquire it?

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LS thoughts (5). Be glad for what you have, that's an easy way to start.

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Yeah, I know, the last one is a quote from a Veggie Tales song. It's from"Madame Blueberry," which I maintain is the most relevant Veggie Tales episode ever. But I digress.

I have to say, and a couple of my FB friends also had this to say, that the repeated calls for transnational governing bodies to take up the problems of global environmental health and to enforce agreements make me a bit... uneasy. Reckless, was the word that one of my FB friends used for it, and I think I actually agree with that designation. We all know how willing powerful people are to take things out of context to justify doing things the way they want to do them.

When we hear "transnational governing bodies" we think of the UN, and of the UN often the best thing that can be said of it is that its intentions were good, once. It hasn't just been a corrupt body; it's been a body bent on calling evil good and good evil, off and on throughout its history.

If you take the document as a whole, it is pretty clear that Pope Francis is not calling for organizations that operate the way the UN does, with the kinds of goals and governing principles that the UN has. He is calling for massive conversion of heart at all levels of society including the transnational. But: the sound bites will never reflect that. One can argue that the media will never stop taking Popes (and anyone else who is invested by enough people with moral authority) out of context, and that there are no words which cannot be twisted to suit someone else's purposes. And Francis does seem to be more "reckless" than his last few predecessors, in a lot of ways. He's not as precise. He seems to be more easily taken out of context.

This is a high-risk situation for a Pope to be in, to be sure, that's what "reckless" means, but high risk might also bring high reward, and I'm hopeful. St. Francis was himself reckless in many ways and is still taken out of context all the time, and yet, those who look beyond the popular image and deeper at the ascetic, at the historical St. Francis, the holiness of the man himself (not either the pious legend or the impious legend) will find something that calls to conversion of heart and of life.

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Besides the bits that I summarized above, I took away from the encyclical some concrete advice at the level of family life. We are squarely in the class of people who have plenty of resources to live a life that is in accord with human dignity, and then some, and so it's that advice for people who live in rich countries that speaks more to us.

We can afford not to externalize the costs of our lifestyle. It is a false economy, for example, to buy cheap junk which breaks, can't be repaired, is landfilled and then must be replaced with more cheap junk. Even if a thing costs more to be repaired than to be replaced, perhaps it is more fitting to pay a worker to fix it than to landfill it and cheaply replace it. We should continue to use a thing until it becomes unusable, and then try to recycle it, rather than get a new version just because a new one is available. This is frustrating with electronics, which are subject to a system in which they are designed to become functionally obsolete and to force us to replace them before they are "broken;" but we can use them longer than we might, if we are willing to put up with minor irritations for a while, and over a lifetime we might consume significantly fewer electronic devices than if we had listened to the culture of new-and-shiny.

We are tempted to use climate control unnecessarily. Mind you, climate control isn't evil; we are having a heat advisory right now, and I have the air conditioning on. Climate control saves lives, in fact, especially in the case of the elderly and sick, and people who suffer from windborne allergies and can't function well with open windows. But I have found myself over the past few winters slipping into a "doggone it, I can afford to turn the heat up" mentality, and stabbing the button to take it from 68 F to 73 F. It's true, I could put on a sweater and a pair of fingerless gloves. It's a small sacrifice, which means that the turning-up of the heat is a very petty luxury.

We can choose to maintain beautiful things no matter where we are, either as individuals or as communities. One of the things that I really liked about this "ecological encyclical" -- it really isn't an "environmental" one so much as an "ecological" one -- is that it included manmade beauty as well as natural beauty as worthy of preservation. Pope Francis mentioned buildings and fountains and city squares, along with landscapes and rivers, as worthy for human beings to rally around, form an identity of place around, and preserve. I have a bias toward cities and the beautiful and useful things that people design and build, the way that we transform the earth into something new and the ways that we concentrate in urban areas and build social networks that have a sense of unity and identity despite a diverse population, and I was delighted to find that this human ecology has received plenty of attention. So yes, we can join together in civic groups to preserve wetlands and forests, but it's also good to join Friends of the Library, a local historical association, or any number of other civic groups that strengthen human bonds and keep the city from becoming impersonal and ugly.

We could all do with a little more gratitude for the good things we enjoy. The Holy Father reminded us that the blessing before and after meals is a fitting way to pause and exercise that gratitude; we do, as a family, regularly give thanks before meals, but we haven't really done the after-meals thing. We tried for a little while some years ago, but trailed off as we couldn't really find a good time that was the "end" of the meal, as kids asked to be excused one by one. Mark and I talked about that and we decided we would try to bring that back. I left it up to him to figure out exactly how it's going to work. Maybe instead of excusing the kids one at a time as they finish, we'll excuse them all at once, say the after-meal blessing, and then they'll run away and we can finish the wine together.

We could be careful only to acquire the things that we can "administer for the good of all" -- where that might mean for the genuine benefit of our family (the education of the children, the care for each member's bodily needs) or might mean to care for it so it can be enjoyed by others. (I'm struck by how this resonates to the same frequency as the Marie Kondo book that I read a couple of months ago. It feels pretty wasteful to get rid of so much unused, non-joy-sparking stuff, but once you've done it, an a-ha! goes off in your head and there's a reluctance to allow any more non-joy-sparking stuff back in.)

We can do all those small things that, we are told, add up to making a difference: reduce food waste, reuse and recycle containers, cut down on unnecessary car trips, live more simply. Sure, it's annoying, and it seems to be a drop in the bucket, but in a spirit of sacrifice it may do some good; like fasting, it has worth beyond the value of the food not consumed, if the sacrifice is made as an offering. Purely technological solutions that do not ask any sacrifice from us don't have the same dimension of value; self-gift is always effective somehow, even if only interiorly, but technical solutions might have unforeseen consequences and risk becoming just a signifier, a status symbol. Also, small acts of self-sacrifice are available to everyone.

In our family, one of those drop-in-the-bucket things might be to change our patterns of meal planning so that we don't waste so much food (I throw out SO MUCH RICE it's ridiculous) and consume a more sustainable mix of protein sources.

Meatless Fridays are just a starting point (and of course, there are lots of reasons to choose that as a starting point, here in the US where meatless Fridays are optional -- the primary reason one being to take up the penance that belongs to the rest of the Church as a matter of course).

We can recognize that in some countries the people must rely on ocean fish as a primary protein source, and it's a limited resource, and we can abstain from it to leave enough for them -- in economic terms, to keep its price low. (Similar logic might need to be applied to some imported plant foods, such as quinoa, but the economics are complicated.)

We can think of poultry meat as more "expensive" than eggs and dairy protein, pork as more "expensive" than beef, and beef as the most "expensive" of all -- not just based on the dollar value at the supermarket, but based on the amount of agricultural land required to support it. Maybe a three-pound chub of ground beef on sale is not actually as great a deal as it looks. I'm not saying never eat beef -- if you're in need of dietary iron, for example, it's very hard to beat it -- but it seems a reasonable sacrifice to regularly abstain from it, save it for legitimate feasts. Some of the costs of that sale beef have been externalized, and if we pay more for less (as we would if we restricted ourselves to, say, grass-fed small-farmed animals) maybe we can take up more of the responsibility for the real costs as well as supporting family farms.

I think that we have a lot to think about here, as a family, and even more to do. Fundamentally, though, Laudato Si' recommends a change in attitude. I think that it's very compatible with the spiritualities I have become most interested in over the past few years: for example, Elisabeth Leseur's ideas that our tiniest actions and words may affect others in ways that we could never fathom, spreading outward like ripples through time and from person to person, which means that we never have the luxury of apathy. If Elisabeth Leseur's special gift was to integrate her married life with her spirituality, then I think what Pope Francis is calling here is to integrate our economic lives with our spirituality. Too often we separate them, but in fact we must integrate all of ourselves into Christ, and that means every decision we make is a moral decision. Yes, even a choice of taste, like whether your ice cream is chocolate or vanilla or strawberry -- or maybe that's a bit extreme; how about, whether your tacos are carne asada or pollo or frijoles.

15 May 2015

Have we quite finished all of our work yet this year, the children and I? Not quite. I had planned to do a bit more.

Once upon a time, we used to continue "doing school" in each subject until we'd finished the book, so to speak (except for math, which is never done... there is always another book around the corner, and we just keep chugging along... a little slower in the summer, perhaps).

This meant that we emerged gradually into the summer sunlight. History book complete! A few days later, perhaps the science curriculum would run out. And so on until there was nothing left but the math books, so that the children would be rewarded for "I'm bored" all summer with "Well then! Go do a math lesson. It'll keep you sharp!"

This year it isn't going to work that way. We took a look at the calendar. In a few weeks there's a week blocked off on the calendar for a family vacation. Then a week that isn't blocked off -- but H's family will already be gone on their family vacation -- and then a week where the boys are at scout camp -- and then soon thereafter we'll go to Ohio to visit family -- and then the boys will stay a little longer with Grandma and Grandpa -- and then the boys go on the high-adventure Scout trip... and then we're going on a bike/camping trip with friends...

They've all managed to defeat me by scheduling their summer to be full of valuable experiences that will prevent them from checking educational boxes!

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What this means is that, like it or not, I have about three full weeks left in the school year (one of which has Memorial Day in it).

It is time for me to stop asking "how much longer will it take for me to finish all the stuff we are supposed to finish?"

It is time for me to ask instead "what is the best use of our time in the last three weeks of the school year?"

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Mark laughed and said, "You know, I've heard that once or twice there was a public-school teacher who had to stop for the year before she finished the last chapter of the book."

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So, for example. I've got five sessions left to work with the two high school boys on geometry. But if I didn't have a time limit, I'd have 17 more sessions (why am I so behind? Because last school year H and I had three babies between us). However, by happy coincidence, there are exactly six lessons left in the book, and the second-to-last is much more important than the last one (it lays the foundations for understanding calculus by introducing the notion of building up volume formulas by constructing solids from a large number of very thin "slices"), so I'm going to spend one day on each of these lessons. I won't get to do two chapter reviews, I won't get to do two chapter tests, I won't get to do a final exam, and I won't get to spend two sessions per lesson. Oh well! It will have to do.

I had five weeks left in Modern World History, with the last week to be spent on a capstone timeline analysis. The capstone week is probably the most important and so I'll keep it as the last week. But I'll need to remove half the material from the rest of the course to reduce four weeks' assignments down to two. Since they're trying to finish a course-long research paper at the same time, I'll probably do that by reducing the writing workload to almost nothing.

I'm going to totally finish 9th-grade Latin though! Woo hoo! Two weeks of lessons left in the book!

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The elementary schoolkids' work will just stop at one point. My 9th-grader was put in charge of his own schedule for a few other subjects -- Algebra II and Evolutionary Biology -- and I'm going to let him live with the consequences of being just a little bit behind on those, meaning that he might need to schedule some time finishing up the books over the summer during the weeks he isn't at Scout camp. I've checked -- it isn't an onerous amount, and doing a little bit in the mornings here and there should be enough. I am not in charge of that, though. He is.

Which means that... after three more weeks of work...

... I'll be done.

And my last schoolday of the year will be a Thursday at H's house where we have dinner there and the elementary school kids will recite the poetry they memorized all year long.

I just realized I will have a perfect use for the bottle of decent bubbly that Mark brought me at Valentine's Day. I think I will struggle on until then, with the pop of that cork awaiting me in the light of summer.

11 May 2015

On Mother's Day I received an email from my father-in-law and mother-in-law. It was addressed both to me and to my sister-in-law, who is married with one young child.

It went like this:

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[My name], [SIL's name]

We just wanted to take a moment to express our warmest thanks to both of you for being such wonderful mothers. Our grandchildren are truly blessed to have you for their Mom.

A big part of being a good Mom is showing your children what real love between a husband and wife, and within a family should be. We see that with both of you, and are forever grateful for the loving example you set.

You know that we love you with all our hearts and always will. Thank you for being you, the wonderful women, wives and Moms that you are. We are so proud of both of you, and live with the joy of having you as a part of our wonderful family.

Best wishes for the happiest of Mother's Day.

With all our love and blessings,

Mom & Dad

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I paused and read this email over and over before I was ready to sit down and compose a reply thanking my in-laws for such kind words and for being the role models that they are to me.

In one sense, a message like this is completely unremarkable. It is the kind of thing that they do and say for the people around them all the time. The two attributes that I admire most in Mark's parents, the ones I aspire to: they are kind, and they are reasonable. Everybody, I think, should try to be kind and reasonable. On top of that, they are people of faith. This is less a thing that people can "try" to be or can "aspire" to be; it's the sort of thing that comes to you as a gift. It is a thing to be thankful for and to appreciate. I do appreciate it.

Perhaps it is a small thing, for a kind and reasonable and faithful person, to send such a message.

It is not always a small thing to receive one.

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Jen Fitz wrote an almost-entirely-unrelated blog post that I saw yesterday right before leaving for church, when I was feeling down about all the things on my list that I was not going to be able to get done. The post was aimed at pastors who felt they were preaching into a black hole. The line in her post that lifted my heart up was this:

"Your stalwart troops aren’t uncrushable, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to hear the truth over and over again, because life in the world sucks the spirit dry."

I thought: She is right. I am not anxious today because there is something deeply and particularly wrong with me. I am anxious today because like everyone in the world, life in it sucks my spirit dry now and again. I need to hear the truth over and over, as a corrective to the false promises and threats that are taken in with the air we breathe. And my heart was lifted because I was about to leave the house to be immersed in truth for just a little while, and I knew that it would do me some good.

(The biggest falsehood our society tells is the utilitarian one: the idea that a person's worth is measured in production and consumption. I don't believe it anymore, but I fall for it sometimes still in small ways. "Success" and worth are not the same.)

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Here is something you may not know about me:

I have a relative who makes a point of telling me directly, when this relative gets a chance, that my children receive "horrible parenting."

Those are not scare quotes. The words appeared in writing to me. I still have the communication in my possession and can double-check it. Pointing to a particular disapproved-of behavior the last time we were invited to visit: "Just another incident of horrible parenting."

There was more. There has always been more.

I grew up hearing -- not from everyone in my life, but by one significant person -- that I had no common sense.

I grew up hearing that I was heartless and that my actions proved that I didn't care about other people.

I grew up hearing, repeatedly, that I was full of shit.

This is not the only thing I heard, of course. I got excellent grades. I won awards. I was offered scholarships. Those earned me praise. They were the only way I knew for a long time how to measure the worth of a person.

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As I grew into adulthood and watched other people raising their children, married and began to have my own children, I came to understand how very unhinged from reality all those words were; how unhinged they still are.

They must come from a place that is small and pinched, a place I cannot understand -- a place I thank God I cannot understand, at least as long as it is not my vocation to provide care for someone who lives in such a prison.

I understand that these are not words that have ever been meant to mean anything. There is not a reason behind them. They are meant to go out into the world to try to make a different reality, because people loving each other and being kind and reasonable somehow offends.

Some people, they say, do not really want to be happy.

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So I know that there isn't any there there. I do.

And yet. It is good to be washed in the words of kind and reasonable people from time to time.

I respect and love them -- not because they say nice things to me that I want to hear, but because I see their lives of good work and reason. I see that they are honest in everything they do. I have reason to believe people of integrity. I have reason not to believe people whom I know not to be people of integrity.

But none of this would be worth anything if people of integrity minded their own business and kept to themselves. To set the record straight, the kind and reasonable people have to testify.

All this is to say:

Tell the people you love that you love them, and tell them that you see and know and appreciate the fruits of their work, the fruits of their love. Tell the people you meet in passing that you see their good work and appreciate it. Tell people they make a difference, even a small difference, in a good way.

It matters. It matters so much.

You might think it's obvious (especially if you are kind and reasonable and you expect to see kindness and reasonableness everywhere).

It isn't always obvious.

You might think, "Other people surely tell them."

Maybe. But not everyone finds it easy to speak kind words, because sometimes kind words are punished.

If you have the gift of being kind and reasonable, spread it. Tell people. Say, "Good job. You are loved. You are worthy."

Go out on a limb.

It matters.

Everything we say or do to someone else bears fruit, and we do not know the impact we have.

[N]eutrality is impossible where it is a question of doing the good... Every person is an incalculable force, bearing within her a little of the future. Until the end of time our words and actions will bear fruit, either good or bad; nothing that we have once given of ourselves is lost, but our words and works, passed on from one to another, will continue to do good or harm to later generations.

This is why life is something sacred, and we ought not to pass through it thoughtlessly but to understand its value and use it so that when we have finished our lives we will have increased the amount of good in the world.

and,

The first thing to do is to try to become our best selves... And God will do the rest. Our effort, our sacrifices, our actions, even the most hidden, will not be lost.

This is my absolute conviction: everything has a long-lasting and profound repercussion.

This thought leaves little room for discouragement, but it does not permit laziness.... I am unable to despair of humanity.

26 April 2015

Have I really not ever written a whole post about this? I can't believe it. I must have put everything on Facebook. Well, going to do it now.

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Sunday afternoons wipe me out. If we don't have a planned family fun activity scheduled, I will often wander upstairs right after lunch, lie down for "just a few minutes," and the next thing I know it is 4:30 and I feel like I have been run over by the special truck that comes on Sunday afternoons just to run me over.

And then, of course, it is time to get dinner on the table.

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I like being in charge of cooking. Really, I do; one of the things that makes our life so lovely is that I enjoy cooking, never really get tired of it; I achieve moments of flow in the kitchen, chopping and stirring; I love trying new recipes; I like eating, so it's nice for me that (being the cook) I get to make whatever I feel like eating; I like choosing menus that will fit into our week. The only thing about it that isn't much fun is trying to make the grocery list and menu plan when I am feeling rushed, because then I know I will make suboptimal or boring choices and that makes me less happy than everything being interesting and well-chosen, but it is still okay.

Mark is capable in the kitchen if necessary and has his own little repertoire of things to make when for some reason I am unable to make dinner. Which is great. The kids like his stuff (chilaquiles, bacon-vegetable-tomato spaghetti sauce, the rarely seen lasagna) and so do I.

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We used to use Sunday afternoons for Mark to catch up on household projects and for me to plan my school stuff for the week. Then a few years ago Mark had a sort of -- I don't know -- head-of-household conversion experience and started working on remaking our Sundays to be more restful with more family fun time in them.

This has been a slow change, but it has made a big difference. Saturdays are more busy now -- I do my school planning in the afternoon on Saturdays, and often we have a big housecleaning binge from everyone -- but Sunday afternoons are truly more fun and family-focused. We don't clean the house, just the necessary dishwasher-loading and the like. We take walks sometimes, or naps while the kids do their own thing. I have learned to suppress my inner busy person and just enjoy hanging out, ignoring the sword of Damocles which is things I could be doing right now so that I could relax LATER even BETTER when the things are all done.

Because you know what, the things are never done and if I am going to be restful I have to seize it from the jaws of things that are not yet done.

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Sunday dinner was a sticking point, though. Because you have to eat, and making the dinner was my job.

I remember once (I was pregnant, which is probably definitely relevant) walking into the messy kitchen about 3 pm and bursting into tears because Mark had been insisting that we all relax and have fun on Sunday because it was Sunday and as a result no one had cleaned up anything in the kitchen all day and now I had to MAKE DINNER in the MESSY KITCHEN and everybody got a day of rest but MEEEEEEEE and I don't remember how that ended but I think takeout was involved.

But it all changed soon after the 15-month-old was born almost a month early and just a couple of days before New Year's Eve. We felt deprived of a party, so when I was just starting to sit at the table for dinner again -- maybe 10 days postpartum -- Mark went to the store to buy festive food. He remembered how after a previous birth, his parents had sent us a gift basket from the fancy grocery store, and he bought the kinds of things that were in that basket, and things that pregnant women are supposed to avoid these days. Lox, and several kinds of crackers, and good runny cheese. Cut vegetables with some kind of dip. And fancy salami, maybe proscuitto, and some sweet things too. Party food! We sat around the table, a brand-new family of seven, and devoured cheese and crackers. Probably there was good beer, or maybe some bubbly. It was great. Satisfying. Festive. Special.

And -- this is crucial -- almost no work at all.

It was sitting around that table with the new baby that we had the epiphany we had been waiting for. This was how Sunday dinner needed to be, for as long as we were busy raising young children. It was the solution to the puzzle that had eluded us for so long.

Making food from scratch is not restful enough. Leftovers (at least on their own) are not feast-ive enough. But bought hors d'oeuvres -- enough for everyone to get their fill -- are both festive and easy! Problem solved!

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Now Sunday dinner prep looks like this: At least two kinds of crackers (even if it's just saltines and Triscuits) are set out in bowls, and sometimes a take-and-bake baguette is popped in the oven and sliced. Someone slices salami (or summer sausage); someone arranges 2 or 3 kinds of cheese, usually a mix of fairly inexpensive cheddars and goudas appreciated by the kids, with one good cheese appreciated by me. If we have leftover deli meats of other kinds, those go out as well. (An alternative to the sausage-and-cheese platter: lox and cream cheese on cocktail rye. Mm.) We keep a small stock of jars and cans of fancy olives and preserves and spreads and pâtés and things, which we add to whenever we happen to see something interesting while out and about, and one or two of those goes on the table. We cut up peppers and celery and carrots and radishes, and put them out for dipping, either with bought hummus or with good olive oil, salt, and pepper -- a trick we learned in Rome. We open wine or beer, and the kids may have juice boxes or soda if they have some. It takes maybe 20 minutes to put on the table and is not hard to clean up.

And it feels like Sunday.

We call this kind of dinner "plate," borrowing a word from the family of a friend. I think smorgasbord would be a better word, but plate has stuck.

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We can't keep the work at bay forever. After dinner on Sunday it's back to the grindstone, cleaning up and prepping for the week. But I feel like we've finally hit the sweet spot.

A lot of "wow this is the best solution ever to our problem" doesn't stick. I post about my life-changing new idea with enthusiasm, my readers tell me I am a genius [polishes nails on lapel], and then after a month or a season or a new baby I give up, slink away, and never speak of my formerly great idea again.

i have a feeling this one is robust enough to stick, at least as long as we can afford cheese and crackers.

18 April 2015

My oldest is 14, nearly fifteen now, and he has grown capable and attentive to his younger siblings, and so Mark and I have been entrusting them to him for longer and longer periods over the past few months. I felt he had to get used to it gradually (maybe it was us who had to get used to it), so we started by taking the baby with us on walks to a coffeeshop for just an hour or two, leaving him to watch over the 11, 8, and 5yo; and then we took the 15mo baby with us while we went out to dinner; and then we started leaving the baby with him too.

So far, so good, and the outings where we leave the baby have still been fairly short. Mostly they consist of Mark and I walking the half-mile to the busy street where there are a few restaurants, and grabbing a beer together. (My new passion is a Belgian sour paired with a big basket of hot french fries.)

We pay him for these outings. I know that watching one's younger siblings is in many families considered an ordinary chore of the sort that teens are supposed to just do, as one clears the table or takes out the garbage. Some "babysitting" has been like that; I have been occasionally dashing out during the schoolday, and for that there has been no transaction. "I have to go sign up for swim lessons at the Y before the deadline, I just got the baby down for a nap, listen for him," I'll call to the 14yo, who is curled up in the game room with his iPad writing an English paper or something, and he'll nod and off I'll go, myself, in the van with two booster seats and one car seat and several more un-boosted seats, and all of them (except mine) empty and quiet. And I come back as fast as I can, not because I am worried about anyone but because I know that the 14yo has a stack of schoolwork as high as my arm to do and I want to free him up to do it.

That kind of thing -- the quick dash to the store, made possible by the extra Big Person who has suddenly materialized in my home -- feels like a clearing-the-table, take-out-the-garbage kind of task. But swinging my small bag over my shoulders and stepping out with Mark to (I can't stop saying it, it's still so amazing) go out to grab a beer on a weeknight is something extra, something that doesn't technically have to happen to keep the house running but is only made slightly easier if the kids are temporarily watched by someone else. It is the kind of thing that we get babysitters for, and babysitters are paid. I, personally, honestly feel that Mark and I would be abusing our office as We-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed if we ordered the teenager to babysit without pay merely so we could grab a beer.

(Unless there wasn't any beer in our fridge and we needed to go buy some. Then it would be "dashing out for an essential errand" and would fall into the chores category with clearing the table and taking out the garbage.)

The other reason we pay him is that he is old enough to be earning some money beyond the lemonade-stand kid stuff, and we haven't yet made up our minds to make him go out and get a real job (what's up with that kid? When I was fourteen years old I was itching to make some money I could call my own! Kids these days), and, well, this is an easy way for us to have him do it. And maybe learn some saving skills now that his own sweat is on the line.

Mostly it appears that he is using his nouveau-riche status to become an aficionado of expensive bottled root beer, but I am biting my tongue for now. It's his money.

+ + +

So I don't have a system for paying him or for figuring out how much to pay him or anything like that quite yet. The kid-who-is-old-enough-to-babysit kind of snuck up on us and we didn't have time to think about it What I have been doing, as a stopgap measure -- and I have told him, "This is a stopgap measure and we will figure out a more permanent payment thing soon" -- is pay him a flat five dollars on each occasion that we run out for a beer, regardless of whether it's for 45 minutes or two hours.

Yes, it's a pittance, but bear with me. Because the 14yo is inexperienced still, we have been keeping the occasions quite short, and we also have not been driving anywhere while he's in charge. We've remained strictly in our own neighborhood, within sprinting distance (well, Mark could sprint there, anyway). We're lucky that there are a couple of nice restaurants within the sprinting radius, but these outings still feel informal and short.

Think of it as a training wage.

Next week, however, I am sending him to take the famous Red Cross babysitter's training. And after that, seeing as how he will possess a certification of sorts, we're going to sit down with him and negotiate a real hourly rate. Yes, even though we are the parents, "negotiate" -- one of the things that the Red Cross training is supposed to include is "how to decide how much to charge," so I intend to make him apply that knowledge.

The hourly rate I am willing to pay my own teenager will be less than the rate I would be willing to pay an outsourced teenager. Working from home is a perk, after all. I expect the pay demanded by outsourced teenagers to reflect the additional time and expense of traveling to and from my home and the inconveniences of not being totally free, for example, to grab a snack from the fridge whenever they want, or to work on their own projects around their house if the baby goes down for a nap and the 5yo is comfortably ensconced with a video.

But the 14yo will, after that point, be doing real work for us, not just "let's take a walk and give him some practice watching over the younger ones" kind of work, and so he's going to be trading value for value.

A couple things still have to be decided (beside the hourly rate itself).

For one thing -- I still have to talk to Mark about this -- I suspect that our We-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed status will still come into play in that I think we will retain the authority to make him babysit for us sometimes (for pay) whether he wants to or not, taking into consideration whether he has lots of homework and the like. But we'll pay him.

For another thing, while the babysitting course includes basic first aid, there's another level. He could take the full first aid/CPR course, for example. I think I would like to offer (during wage negotiations) to pay for that additional certification and promise a raise should he complete it. I would like to encourage him to do this just as a matter of course. Taking CPR is not only a useful skill, it also would open the door to getting lifeguard certification, something I have often thought should be a graduation requirement for my homeschool.

+ + +

I feel flush with freedom, on the cusp of being able to go out for a date with Mark any time I want. Up till now we have been limited, not so much by the cost of a babysitter, but by a dearth of them. (Typically we have hired the babysitter to be in charge of everyone except our oldest, who has permission to do homework or read or whatever while we're gone, but is supposed to be available to answer questions or fetch things the babysitter can't find.)

There is, it turns out, a limited supply of teenagers who are sufficiently older than my oldest child AND not someone who is a Friend's Kid and therefore automatically bereft of perceived authority over my own children because they have played together in somebody's backyard or basement. And those teenagers have a limited supply of time.

I have gone so far as to contact the eligible teenagers well in advance and say "Do you want money? Whenever you want money, please tell me when YOU are free. Please. I want to give you my money. LET ME GIVE YOU MONEY."

After I had reserved the 14yo's spot in the Red Cross class, I still had a couple of babysitter dates on the calendar, including last night and (next week) the evening after the 14yo was slated to have completed the class. It seemed kind of silly, with him being so close to being able to take the place of the babysitter, to make him be babysat (after a fashion). So last night we took him, and the two next kids, with us, and left the two littles with the babysitter.

We went to the indoor climbing gym for a few hours, and all climbed together, something that most definitely cannot be done with a baby in tow. It was the first time we'd climbed together since our trip to France in the fall.

Mark and my daughter on the auto-belays.

Look -- I drew blood!

Then the five of us went two doors down to a pizza place, and we all fit together in one high-backed booth. The three big children, not having been enjoned to entertain littler ones, talked a mile a minute, about the climbing and the pizza and the root beer, and about the week's work, and what the baby did when, and the movies they hoped to see soon, and what they were reading in their schoolwork. We, not feeling we had to focus on each other with only a limited time to be in a restaurant, listened and laughed and drank pints of good draft beer.

I put my arm around Mark and kissed him on the cheek and said, "This is fun. I have the babysitter scheduled again for next week -- let's do it again." And so we will.

And so I don't think my days of outsourcing babysitter time are entirely over. And I am not at all sorry.

17 March 2015

My post on "I don't know how you do it" as an othering statement got a little bit of traffic and commentary. Most of the quotes are from Facebook, so I'm not going to attribute them (unless one of the original writers should happen to read this followup and ask me to).

Some people felt that the "othering" is not necessarily a form of dismissal, but more "an acknowledgement of the skill set of someone"else that I seem to lack:"

We're talking about the skills that can and do develop out of necessity in times of necessity. The statement is, I think, more a statement about grace and hope - the hope that there are skills out there that I don't have; that there is grace for surviving... I'm not saying that it is something that should be said - because it does grate and feel like othering.

See, now, to that I would say that IDKHYDI is not the appropriate observation to make (out loud) because in this case it's not true. The writer of this observation does know "how that person does it," or at least she has a theory: out of necessity the skills develop. She calls it grace and hope. IDKHYDI is a statement of hopelessnessShe has put herself in that person's shoes and imagined "if I had to, I would be able to do that." This is the antithesis of IDKHYDI, which is a statement of hopelessness.

Others said as much:

If you think about it, there's a falseness to it in even those cases, though. After all, you admit you *do* know "how they do it"--by developing a skill set, by working hard, by surviving, by giving some things up (or having them taken), by relying on other's support, by making different choices. So it might actually help to mentally rephrase that into a more accurate statement: "I admire what you are able to accomplish."

Another suggestion offered was that "IDKHYDI" is sometimes simply true: the endurance is incomprehensible. A reply (not from me):

[T]here are situations where "I could never do..." can be accurate self-assessment. Given my neurological limitations, for example, I could never do anything that requires a great deal of quick memorization.

Of course, that's not usually what is meant by that statement. Usually what is meant is "I could never prioritize that goal the way you do."

And I think that's exactly right about what's meant. Another friend of mine jumped in to agree with this and added, that yes, that is what IDKHYDI means:

For everything from "I could never be a stay-at-home mom" to "I could never be monogamous."

That led to the reply:

I was thinking of fitness and diet when I wrote that, since that's where I've caught myself thinking, "I could never..." when the truth is really that it's not a priority to me now... I want to say "I could never" because being faced with differing priorities can be uncomfortable; I may admire them, but that challenges me to examine my own.

"I could never..." allows me to acknowledge the accomplishment without being challenged by it.

And some pointed out that yes, you can come up with examples where "IDKHYDI" (or its cousin, I could never do what you do) is literally true. (There's that plausible deniability again!) But most of the time it's not:

People say these things about all kinds of accomplishments that are not really incomprehensible--or are very easily answered (I don't know how you become such an accomplished pianist. Oh, it takes several thousand hours of dedicated practice? Good to know.

Someone asked me,

Out of curiosity--do you think "othering" is a verb that refers to intent, to something objective about the situation or statement, or primarily to effect?

That did get me thinking.

+ + +

Possibly people who find themselves being "othered" feel all kinds of ways about it. I think the dichotomy is that in any given situation a person can either be "special" or she can "connect with" others.

Sometimes that is a choice: I can choose to be special, or I can choose to connect.

Otherwise it is something done to a person: I can choose to connect with you, or I can choose to identify you as special.

The difficulty in discourse is that the dichotomy exists irrespective of whether "special" means especially admirable or especially deficient. Either way the identification as "special" is evidently preferable to connection. And what was consciously intended as admiration, even if unconsciously a sort of exercise in identity strengthening, can sometimes read as rejection.

More insidiously, the ambiguity inherent in the statement means that the rare person who consciously intends to invalidate someone else by deliberately othering her has a cover story to exploit. Or maybe that is less insidiously; maybe the bigger problem is created by the legions of people who really don't mean to say anything hurtful or alienating but wind up doing it anyway because they Just. Don't. Think.

Most of the time, however, I believe there are conscious and unconscious components to it. The othering is itself the conscious part: A conscious, however faint, identification and decision to verbalize "you are a different kind of person from me."

The fact that it is often a hostile and defensive choice of verbalization (compared to alternatives that would display curiosity, attempt empathy, or seek commonality) is, I believe, largely unconscious.

+ + +

I will not disagree with the notion that many people are just trying to say something neutral or kind when they pull out IDKHYDI. I stand by my statement that it is an instance of othering, at least unconscious, and frequently the othering is deliberate and conscious though it be without conscious malice ("you are special"). I think magical thinking is part of it sometimes (you are different from me and that reassures me that I will never be in your situation) and desire not to be challenged is part of it sometimes (I could never) and part of it is sheer tribalism (you're nuts, lady). The ambiguousness of the intent makes IDKHYDI akin to, if not as serious a social problem as, othering statements in the context of racial and gender differences. The ambiguousness provides plausible deniability that will be accepted as innocuous by members of the speaker's "tribe" and further serve as a marker of exclusion for those who object to the label. ("People like that are so sensitive, I was only trying to be nice.")

So what if, instead of IDKHYDI, we sought and acknowledged common ground? What would that look like? Humans are adaptable, we are capable of changing our priorities, and we are capable of intense focus on our identified priorities -- all of us are. We don't have to think that we would choose the same priorities in order to praise someone for doing the hard work that makes their priorities happen. Why on earth must we always get defensive when faced with someone who has done nothing more aggressive to us than arrange her own priorities in a different way?

+ + +

Later, on Saturday morning, I thought of an example. I was trying to get to the weekday (well, Saturday -- not Sunday, I mean) eight o'clock Mass at the parish in the first suburb to the south, but I'd been sluggish in getting out of bed. I was slurping down an espresso at 7:21 a.m., Italian-style, standing up in the coffee shop, hoping that this would get me under the wire for communion if the homilist wasn't too brief; and wondering how people (especially ones with small children) ever manage to get to a weekday morning Mass every single day. I'm a morning person and it seems insurmountable.

And yet I know that people do it. Because they have different priorities (thank you, Facebook commenter).

No -- wait -- they don't have different priorities, as if specially gifted people wake up and find themselves in possession of the appropriate priorities.

They make from the situation they are in, priorities that fit into that situation and that satisfy their values.

So in my imaginary dialogue with The Mother Who Is Something Like Me Except That She Goes To Weekday Masses More Often Than Only Once In A While -- okay, really it's a monologue --

-- I could say: I don't know how you do it.

Or I could stretch my imagination just a teeny bit and say: "Gosh, I think that if I were going to make it to an 8 a.m. Mass every day, instead of only once in a while, I would need to buy an espresso machine for my kitchen. What's your secret?"

That doesn't shut down a conversation -- at least not on purpose. It might start one. I think it's better. But it's probably not the only way.